The US military previously captured on tape a shiny metallic orb UFO hovering in the Middle East. Now, the mysterious orb may have finally been identified.
Metallic Orb Sighting in Middle East
The footage was specifically taken back on July 12, 2022. The object was seen hovering under an MQ-9 Reaper drone. The date matches Syria's Eid al-Adha festivities, which started in the evening of July 8 and went on until July 12.
The coverage was then publicly released for the first time before the Armed Services Committee last April.
Now, a controversial investigation group known as Bellingcat, along with data scientists, has claimed that they were able to deflate the great speculation tha tthe object could be an alien probe over the Middle East.
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Metallic Orb Sighting Mystery Solved?
The researchers were able to determine the flight path of the mystery orb at the northeast of Syria's Deir ez-Zor city. This was something that the Pentagon previously kept hidden.
According to their report, the object is likely to be a party balloon consisting of a silver and metallic plastic called Mylar.
The scientists were then able to match the footage of the orb with satellite data. More specifically, the researchers used imagery from Google Earth Pro that was taken on July 13, 2022. They were then able to monitor the flight path of the object.
Their observations suggest that the orb's diameter was likely less than 1.5 feet. They think that the orb was released during Eid al-Adgham, which is the second and biggest religious celebration of Muslims.
While the orb appeared like it took just 16 seconds to pass over 750 meters across the Syrian desert, the team argues that this could be due to a parallax optical illusion. According to their calculations, the Reaper drone that covered the orb was moving at roughly 186 mph with an 24,606-feet altitude, the object may have easily moved something nearer to the speed of the local wind.
However, there was still a gap pertaining to wind data that the report did not further elaborate. Nevertheless, the team included an interactive parallax calculator with their report.
UFO Investigations
Though many true believers of UFOs and more advocates of UFO transparency commended the investigative efforts of Bellingcats, there are others who questioned why the UFO office of the Pentagon decided to highlight this footage.
Christopher Mellon, the former Deputy Assistant Secretary from the Defense for Intelligence, explains in a post on X (formerly Twitter) that this verifies the suspicions of several people regarding the object's slow speed and small size. Ever since helping with the lead of three UFO videos that were unclassified in 2017, Mellon has led efforts to urge the government to be more open and serious with UFO investigations.
The campaign saw fruit as it led to a briefly lived UFO task force back in 2020. Now, there is a permanent UFO office in the Department of Defense, which looks into these cases under the name Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP).
However, Mellon is not quite happy about how the mandate has been handled by the new group, officially known as All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO).
It took a whole year for the AARO to stand-up its website that still does not have a formal reporting system that military personnel could use to report sightings. The live launch of the site also happened belatedly after the media frenzy regarding the testimony of a UFO whistleblower.
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